Create sweetness in life.

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It’s taken me a few weeks to really soak in just one of the many amazing cookbooks I recently purchased. First up: Momofuku Milk Bar, which is a super attractive book on a purely aesthetic level, but the story behind Momofuku Milk Bar‘s origins and Christina Tosi’s voice throughout is wry, evocative, and sheer engaging. There’s something delightfully appealing about all the trashy/delicious eats unapologetically served up here. Recipes like Compost Cookies and Crack Pie, with their reliance on things like potato chips, chocolate chips, and pretzels, are practically a stoner’s wet dream.

But as if to mock said stoner, obscure ingredients and the immense effort required of these recipes (we’re talking about nested recipes within nested recipes) will intimidate less ambitious non-professional bakers. The baking times of the cookies need some careful tweaking depending on your oven and the way you lay out the cookies on the sheet.

I found myself on Amazon buying things that came in buckets.

Sexy.

This book is not very forgiving. A digital scale is a must. Investing in things like European-style butter over American-style butter makes a profound difference in taste, texture, and overall result. Between the not-so-ordinary ingredients and equipment, I found myself spending a small fortune.

But if you can get past all that, the end result is really, really tasty. Dare I say worth it?

I may have made an ice cream sandwich of Cereal Milk Ice Cream and Corn Cookies for breakfast. I’m not saying I did. I’m just saying it’s a possibility. Don’t judge me. Even if I did, it’s sort of breakfast related because it’s Cereal Milk Ice Cream..which is related to cereal…and it’s wedged between two Corn Cookies. And corn is a vegetable. So, er, health. Coincidentally, these two recipes are the simplest ones in the entire book.

Can we talk about these Corn Cookies? They are dangerously, dangerously addictive. No sooner had I eaten one when I looked down and found I had polished off four. Right. They are wondrously buttery. There’s an absolutely gorgeous balance of salt and sweetness. So tender in the mouth, yet crisp at the edges. It’s like a shortbread cookie but dipped in a vat of awesome because there’s a depth and richness that you could never find in any ordinary shortbread cookie.

These cookies are, in a word, astounding, and I am already thinking of ways I can adapt play with the recipe now that I am slowly getting over my terror of utterly fucking things up.